The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living Online?

It is truly amazing the efforts people go to, to make money online. The longer my experiment in doing the same thing goes on, the more fascinating it becomes. The only restriction I've put on myself is that I won't invest even a few cents in doing it.

At the moment I'm involved in the following: content generation, pay per post forums, adsense. That's it. Time constraints and the fear of carpal tunnel limit me. Also, things like ptc and ptr (pay to click, pay to read) sites tend to spring up and then vanish rapidly and there's a giant element of scam to the whole thing.

The reason people are willing to pay you for contributing to their website, is that they're making advertising revenue from you and everyone else who reads what you put there. Logic say it's therefore better to bypass the middleman and work on promoting your own site with ads on it. The other view, is that the big boys already have all that marketing and promotion in plays and will generate more hits than you can.

The tools at my disposal are a 1st generation MacBook Pro, a dodgy dial-up connection, my hands and my brain. I haven't found any paid copywriting, but for that I have no-one but myself to blame, after 6 months of writing for free and looking for work, I lost heart and faith in my writing. So I use stuff like this in the following way:

Sometimes I publish on triond.com first, because they require first and non-exclusive publication. That makes me money per 1000 page views. They put stuff on to various sites according to category and I think that unless you're going to work hard at being part of the Triond community, there's not a lot of money to be made there. So I've tapered off there and will very likely give it up.

I should rewrite it a bit, then put it on Associated Content, where at least I make a couple of dollars a month on page views and get nice comments too. Then I should rewrite it some more and put it on to a relevant thread at Helium, which generates the same level of income at the moment. If I spent the time and energy to put a lot more content on both those sites, the profits would be bigger.

Of course, this will appear on my own blog too at some point, in the hopes of generating some Adsense revenue and the vague chance of somebody registering for something using the referral links in the article, which benefits me in small ways.

I reached the minimum $5 payout threshold at EMP quickly, but as yet, have not been paid out. The admin responded within a few days asking for my Liberty Reserve account details.

Platinum Lounge works differently you earn points for posting and you can win points by entering contests and by referring new users. I got to the first paying rank, which is called "Honor Roll" this gives me $1 every two weeks, then I won a couple of contests and was quickly at the $2 "Lounge Starter" level. I think the highest it can go is $10 every two weeks. I talk to lots of Indians, Indonesians and Filipinos there, which is fun I like the site.

Earning money at myLot is like pulling teeth with tweezers made of tissue. I have a whole $1.84 there and the minimum payout is $10. You can't copy and paste content until you reach 1 000 posts, so it's no walk in the park. The reason I stay there, is to occasionally trade referrals the three kind souls who signed up for PL on my link there earned me 25 000 points each.

One of those referral trades led me to MoraChat, which is the forum that seems most like a dinkum forum. They're not all rabbitting on about making money, they're talking about music and books and sport and stuff. You sign up there, if you post in the "Introduce Yourself" forum, you get a $1 bonus after that you average 0.02c per post and it has to be a decent post, not a few words. The people are incredibly friendly. The minimum payout there is $10 and I imagine it'd take lots of work to reach it.

The more time I spend on these PTP (pay to post) forums, the more convinced I am that it is absolutely not worth it for the money, unless the dollar is stronger than Jackie Chan in your country. If you're looking for information or just like social networking, they're cool and you may as well earn a few bucks while you're at it. It can also be a good way of generating hits for your monetized blog/website which is the best source of revenue anyway.